Our constant electronic companions cut us off from each other, and from 'the
bliss of solitude'

Nikita Ainley, aged 20, was jailed for three-and-a-half years last week, for causing the death of an old-age pensioner by dangerous driving. When Ainley was 18, she was driving on a country lane while simultaneously sending text messages on her BlackBerry: the result was a head-on crash with another car, in which 68-year-old Mary Rutherford was killed.

When Ainley arrived at York Crown Court for her sentencing last Thursday, she already had a phone clamped in her hands. She was not holding it afterwards, because she was in handcuffs. Dawn Timmings, Mrs Rutherford’s daughter, spoke of how easily the tragedy could have been prevented and how severely the death of her mother had affected her. “All mothers are special,” she said, in words that spoke starkly of a continuing depth of loss. “But she was special to me.”

Ainley, however, was gripped by the incessant urge to communicate, no matter how relatively mundane the material transmitted was. She found herself unable to stop, and clearly could not cease texting even while behind the wheel of a car. Nor could she relinquish her telephone as she walked towards a courtroom containing relatives of the elderly lady whose death her unremitting telephone use had caused. Ainley might be an extreme and even pitiable case, but she is far from alone in her intense attachment.

We may look back now in slack-jawed incredulity at the Mad Men generation, with their spectacular passion for cigarettes and alcohol, and indulgence towards drink-driving. But the current crop of adults, particularly younger adults, are themselves addicted to communicating with electronic devices, and it is the act as much as the content that enthrals them. Just as smokers grow fond of the comforting, repetitious rituals of selecting and lighting a cigarette, so phone-users have become accustomed to the routine inspecting, scrolling and tapping which draws them into a private little portable office while the rest of the world whirls unseen around them.

Tolstoy observed that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, and the same is true of addictions: each carries its unique burden of poison and benefit. Smoking, for example, is brutally destructive of health, but in its heyday – before smokers were banished to shiver on steps in the rain – it was an aid both to sociability and meditation. Watch any old film, and you can see how intensely people used cigarettes as a means of speedily establishing flirtation or friendship. The mutual lighting of a cigarette sent out the complimentary, contemplative message that: “For the space of this dwindling, lit tube of tobacco, there is no more important person in the world for me to spend time with than you.” I’m not romanticising smoking, and I’m glad the habit is in decline – a few glimpses of a cancer or emphysema ward can cure anyone of creeping nostalgia – but one cannot deny its former role as social glue.

The ubiquity of the smartphone is not life-threatening (unless one uses the handset while driving, of course, which studies have found is statistically more dangerous than drink-driving). It is, however, having an enormous effect on our experience of the world and each other, and I don’t think that we have really analysed it yet. Increasingly, people are living their lives in a state I think of as “permanently elsewhere”, locked by smartphones into multiple, fractured conversations with individuals or entertainments that have little or nothing to do with anybody else in the room. At the same time, we are also rarely truly alone without being interrupted by a text or email. We are slowly losing the meaning of both immediate sociability and solitude.

In Wordsworth’s poem “Daffodils” – loved by so many people – the poet famously describes how “I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills” before he sees the dancing daffodils. Yet he enjoys them more profoundly in recollection: “For oft, when on my couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood, / They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude”. Everything in Wordsworth’s poem is joyfully experienced alone, except the final, distilled sharing of it. Today, it would be a distinctly altered experience, because most people would be sharing the image or description from the very moment they saw it. There is often neither time nor desire for distillation: the “inward eye” is closing.

I am not immune to the smartphone’s charm: I know that they can be extraordinarily useful, often necessary for work, and I too thrill to the promising ping of a text. But we will need to learn to regulate our electronic companions, or we are destined to stagger into the future, forever distracted by some time just outside of now.

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Maybe it’s just that I’m getting older, but there’s something enjoyable about watching people who have been famous for a very long time indeed. By and large, the insanity, pomposity, neediness and unrestrained excess of early fame have fallen away (with the possible exception of Morrissey, who seems to get madder and angrier by the day) and they’ve seen enough hangers-on to be able to sniff them out a mile off.

I thought this when I saw Mick Jagger, aged 69, appear on the David Letterman show last week, gamely dispensing his top 10 rules for surviving 50 years in rock’n’roll. He looked good: skinny as ever, dapper and happy. His first utterance, “Nobody wants to hear anything from your new album”, showed a pleasingly wry appreciation of the realities of show business.

Carpers have always said of Jagger that he’s priapic and tight with money, which – if true – is chiefly a problem for his ex‑wives and girlfriends. For audiences, however, the relentless ferocity of his commitment to giving a show has always represented good value, even when ticket prices are high.

Now that he is knocking 70, his dancing has taken on the half-astonishing quality of some kind of possessed, prophetic shaman. Once, parents fretted about the influence of Jagger on their impressionable children, but they underestimated the indestructibility of his work ethic. When he finally boogies into the afterlife, hopefully not for many decades, it can be inscribed on his tombstone: “He never got lazy.”

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The average Briton now requires passwords for more than 22 online accounts, it emerged last week, requiring a confusing jumble of secret codes. I’m not surprised: frequently I have not only forgotten my password, but that I had created an account at all.

Still, sometimes I wonder whether even secure passwords are all they are cracked up to be. I guarded my top-secret telephone banking security number so obsessively that I kept it purely in my head, only silently pressing it into the telephone keypad when required. Then one day I discovered that thieves had got into my bank details, taken out a large sum of money and – to conceal their crime temporarily – even shifted a similar sum from my savings account into the current account. I called the bank.

“You must have told someone your security number,” they said. I vowed heartily that I had not. After lengthy, painful investigations, we finally established that a fraudster had set up an internet banking account in my name, intimately connected to my existing accounts.

“But how on earth could they do it without my security number?” I wailed. “Ah,” they said meaningfully, “these people have ways round these things.” Fade, to the sound of barely muffled screaming.